No it's not a high-five.Ībove: Use of 🙏 Folded Hands has increased. 🙏 Folded Hands saw nearly a 25% increase between August 2019 and April 2020, which could be related to our current circumstances. This is the percentage of tweets featuring at least one emoji that the specific emoji appeared in. Note that in the chart above we describe the percentages for each emoji in each time frame as 'Emoji %'. Movement among 😍 Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes, 😊 Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes and 🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts seen in April 2020 is of note: each express affection, so it is possible the relatively new 🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts is appearing in tweets where either 😍 Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes, 😊 Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes would have previously appeared. The top thirteen emojis, ordered by their relative rank in our sample from April 2020 :Īcross all four time frames, the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy was firmly in first place, followed somewhat distantly by the 😭 Loudly Crying Face.

People are known to be creatures of habit after all.

This shows a relatively stable level of popularity for those emojis most often used by Twitter users. 🔝🔟 Top Ten EmojisĪ total of thirteen different emojis appeared at least once in the analysis of the top ten emojis found over the four timeframes assessed. This a trend which continues year on year. Relative to all smileys sent, negative emoji use continues to show a steady climb year-on-year. This relative newcomer has ended up as the third most popular emoji on Twitter. There is a considerable jump in the number of 'Other/Ambiguous' instances, which is accounted for by rapid ascent of the popular and variable 🥺 Pleading Face. While it's impossible to determine all reasons behind any sentiment shift, this change could be a result of fewer positive tweets due to the current global pandemic, especially as the largest relative drop was seen in the most recent period. These never dropped below 28% of all emoji instances throughout the period measured. What this data also shows is that positive expressions remain the most popular type of smiley.

Isolating instances of smileys and charting the relative size of their emotional polarity ('Positive', 'Negative' or 'Other/Ambiguous') allows a look at emotional trends on Twitter, when it comes to emoji use.Ĭharted below are these three groups of smileys, shown as a percentage of all individual emoji instances during four selected time frames between August 2018 and April 2020.Ībove: The relative use of positive emojis is down, while negative emojis have seen a slight increase.īetween August 2019 and April 2020 the percentage of all individual positive smiley instances decreased from 29.92% to 28.12% - a relative decrease of 5.63%. They're also the most popular type of emoji sent, according to Unicode statistics. Of all the available emojis, smileys tend to be most used to convey emotion, and are most useful for this style of sentiment analysis. 😄😫📊 Emoji Sentimentīy grouping “smiley” emojis – generally classed as the non-human yellow balls of emotion – into positive and negative categories, we can assess various sentiment trends on Twitter. A sentiment analysis performed by Emojipedia finds that positive emoji use is on the decrease, while the total number of emojis sent in our communications continues to rise.Īnalyzing 68 million unique tweets, a number of patterns have emerged which go some way toward reflecting the global mood and how we communicate in the “new normal” of 2020.

Cold heart emoji